La-La-Latvia
For those who weren’t aware (perhaps they were living in a cave or relying on certain websites to update their conference details) this year’s YAPC::EU will be held in the historic Eastern European city of Riga in Latvia, August 15th-17th. Our hosts will be the highly respected wunderkinds of Moscow.pm and the excellent DeepText LLC.
This year promises to be a great conference with the three main days filling up with talks (submissions are still open, there have been 80+ talks submitted and over 40 accepted, the closing date for talks is 17th July) from many well known speakers. As always the organisers welcome talks that follow the Conference theme “Modern Perl” from new and established speakers.
send-a-newbie
Once again the Enlightened Perl Organisation is arranging the Send-a-Newbie initiative to run at the conference.
This is an opportunity for people new to a large conference to have some (or all) of their costs refunded allowing them to attend where otherwise they could not. You can still donate to this initiative by using the button on this page on the donation buttons on the main send-a-newbie site.
Events
There are a number of events being run before, and after, the main conference days. On the Saturday there is a Perl 6 hackathon:
Perl 6 hackathon
Free of charge
Your real chance to contribute to Perl 6!
The Sunday before the conference sees a number of events, a “free” training course for speakers presented by Damien Conway and Alex Kapranov and the usual pre-conference meetings. There are also two training courses:
Dave Cross. Introducing Modern Perl
Teaching class (for extra price)
brian d foy. Surviving Perl Unicode
Teaching class (for extra price)
After the conference finishes we will see more training on the 18th August:
Jonathan Worthington. Object-Oriented Programming in Perl 6
Teaching class (for extra price)
Herbert Breunung. WxPerl in Details
Teaching class (for extra price)
Damian Conway. Perl Best Practices
Teaching class (for extra price)
Gabor Szabo. Testing with Perl
Teaching class (for extra price)
And again on the 19th August:
Damian Conway. Understanding Regular Expressions
Teaching class (for extra price)
The “(for extra price)” means in addition to the subscription to the conference itself which is a very modest price for an event of this quality and callibre.
Final thoughts…
YAPCs present not just a chance to indulge in great talks, and some quality low-cost training but as catalysts for community integration and project foundation and expansion. To many the chance to meet people in person, talk and discuss technology with like-minded others and indulge in the gregarious speculation that a few smooth beers produce is the principal reason for going.
YAPCs are a social event, one where a large group of widely different people from very diverse backgrounds and cultures come together as a community. They are welcoming to outsiders, and they even appreciate people from different technical, or language, backgrounds. You do not have to grok Perl to come to a YAPC, and if you don’t there is a good chance after spending a few days with the people there you will grok it and you will come to see the necessity of our community approach.
